A 50 V, 300 A modular water-cooled DC power supply with high availability for solid state RF amplifier

Overview

A 50 V, 300 A modular water-cooled DC power supply having both DC and pulse loading capability is designed, developed and demonstrated for biasing solid state RF amplifier. This power supply employes two nos. of 50 V, 150 A water-cooled DC power modules and one no. of active redundant power module, operating in parallel in master slave configuration to form a 300 A DC bus. From this DC bus, multiple nos. of individual power amplifiers of solid-state RF amplifier can be fed. This scheme also facilitates the easy replacement of faulty power module. In this scheme, both DC power supply and RF amplifiers are independent and redundancy can be incorporated in DC power supply and RF amplifies independently. The heat load to ambient from this power supply is significantly reduced due to water cooling of its 50 V, 150 A DC power module. This power supply achieves availability of the order of 99.999% due to incorporation of redundancy and is suitable for round the clock operation in 24x7 mode. Its current THD is observed as < 30%, output voltage ripple is observed as ≤ 175 mV, output voltage stability is observed as ≤ 0.8% and overall efficiency is observed as ≥ 90% at 50 V, 300 A DC operating point.

Application: Suitable for simultaneously biasing individual power amplifier (PA) modules of solid-state RF amplifier, operating in CW as well as pulsed mode